Joker, Joker, Deuce (Penguin Poets)

Rating:
Summary: Laughed So Hard, I cried.
Review: One Word: hilarious. This is my favorite poetry book of all time. If you like Aaron McGruder's "Boondocks" comic strip, you should like this. If you're not a poetry person, Beatty's "The White Boy Shuffle" may be more to your liking. On another note, instead of buying the book or the collection of poems, try renting them from your local library.

Rating:
Summary: Laughed So Hard, I cried.
Review: One Word: hilarious. This is my favorite poetry book of all time. If you like Aaron McGruder's "Boondocks" comic strip, you should like this. If you're not a poetry person, Beatty's "The White Boy Shuffle" may be more to your liking. On another note, instead of buying the book or the collection of poems, try renting them from your local library.

Rating:
Summary: Read and re-read, Beatty brings cadence to societal chaos.
Review: These poems are what happens when you mix the raw straight forwardness of hip-hop flows with literary prose. Joker, Joker, Deuce grabs the reader because it hasn't been said like this before. My personal favorite "That's Not in My Job Description" is a biting look at how integration and expected assimilation can make the workplace a danger zone. His use of present historical references gives this book a foothold on pop culture from the dawn of the Old school to the age of the Now school.

Rating:
Summary: Great Novelist but..
Review: White boy shuffle is my favourite books of all time. I own three different editions of it. I spent a year having a crush on a boy just because he read and loved the book too, in fact this guy had a plan to write a letter to Paul Beatty and keep it in his back pocket, just in case he met da man.

But Paul's Poetry speaks very little to me. Partly because there are far too many basketball references which I don't understand, not growing up in the States, and when i read it to myself, I can't pick up the meter and the rythm of the words.

I think it is good, but if you know nothing about basketball, and don't really like rap, you, like me, will probably not get what the author intended us to hear. If only there was a cassette version.